Monacan Millennium: A Collaborative Archaeology and History of a Virginia Indian People by Jeffrey L. Hantman (review)

Monacans are the indigenous peoples of the Piedmont, Ridge and Valley, and Blue Ridge physiographic regions of Virginia, and they played decisive roles in the colonial history of the Chesapeake. Interactions between Siouan-speaking Monacan groups and Algonquian-speaking villages of coastal Virginia—including the Powhatans, who were an important ally and adversary of English colonists—had consequences for the survival of Jamestown and the English colonization of Virginia. Monacan Millennium: A Collaborative Archaeology and History of a Virginia Indian People is an interesting and insightful book about Monacan culture and history, and about their participation in contemporary archaeology and heritage preservation. The book summarizes documentary and archaeological evidence about Monacan groups from 1000 c.e. through the 1700s, analyzes changes in the Monacan cultural landscape in response to English colonialism, and examines strategies promoting Monacan cultural persistence from the period of contact through the present. In the final chapter, author Jeffrey L. Hantman reflects on interactions and conversations with Monacan people during the course of his many years studying Monacan archaeology and history. As the current definitive treatment of Monacan archaeology, this book contributes significantly to scholarship on the history of colonial Virginia, the politics of race and indigeneity in the U.S. South, indigenous and collaborative archaeology, and Native American studies.

A major contribution of this book is its consideration of Ancestral Monacan Society. Before 1000, these peoples lived by hunting and gathering and moving from one seasonal settlement to another; there is minimal evidence of status and wealth differentiation. By 1200, permanent settlements were concentrated in river valleys, and subsistence practices shifted to farming; there is evidence from storage pits for the accumulation and management of surplus resources. Archaeologists know of at least thirteen burial mounds, many of which were situated on the sites of former villages. Written accounts and maps by seventeenth-century European colonists indicate that some settlements served as settings for chiefly households.

English colonists sought trade relations with Monacan groups. Monacan villages were important to the trade networks through which Powhatans and other indigenous groups in the Chesapeake had accessed copper from sources in the Blue Ridge Mountains. After Jamestown was founded in 1607, English colonists became sources of copper for the Powhatans, which changed indigenous trading dynamics. During the eighteenth century, many Monacan people lived in dispersed settlements and farmsteads rather than in large villages, but they still visited large mounds that had long been settings for burying and remembering the dead. Thomas Jefferson witnessed Monacan groups traveling to burial mounds near his Monticello estate, and he also led excavations of one such mound located near the Rivanna River. Archaeological evidence indicates continuity of settlement at some large village sites, and some eventually became focal points for Monacan trade with English colonists. Other settlements, like those in the vicinity of Bear Mountain, the cultural center of the modern Monacan community, represented a strategy and a history of avoidance and resistance to English colonialism, contributing to indigenous cultural persistence and survivance through the present.